vpn's

[Pendragon]

No, your ISP has no way of knowing what you are doing. The VPN creates a secure tunnel through your ISP's network to your VPN provider's network, and your ISP has absolutely no way of peaking inside that tunnel. However, you will want to be sure you change the DNS on your machine to point to someone other than your ISP. A typical home setup will have DHCP assigning DNS addresses that point to your ISP's DNS servers. So theoretically your ISP could see DNS requests and know they are coming from you (I don't know the details of that - google 'dns leak' for more info). I set up my home router to assign Google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), so this was never an issue for me.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Dedicated Mind

pel, my question is once you log on to vpn can you surf the web with internet explorer and go to different websites through the vpn?

You can do it that way, but most vpns are really geared toward a different purpose. I think what you're looking for is a " proxy. " There are many privacy groups and sites that offer a subscription based proxy service.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Dedicated Mind

so even if you are anonymous to the website, your isp still knows what you are doing and what you are downloading, correct??

Not really. When you log into a banking site, for example, your ISP can know (as if they care) what site you are going to... however, every communication with a page that is marked "shttp://..." instead of "http://..." is secure and encrypted. Thus, the ISP can know what bank sites you visit, however they cannot know your banking info, account number, purchases and etc.

Besides, your ISP has already told us all about your web surfing habits and the hours you spend playing http://www.hellokittyonline.com/.

[pelathais]

If you are using a Bit Torrent client to download, then your ISP can "know" that you are downloading something related to file sharing. The same thing with DC++ and the other file sharing protocols. The packet that your computer sends to the remote computer and the packets that you receive all have headers that identify the protocol being used as well as who is sending and receiving. Even if the contents of the packet are encrypted, the headers cannot be because they must be read by the routers along the way.

Why don't you just tell me what you want and I'll see if I already have it.

[Dedicated Mind]

I use bittorrent and saw a reference to vpn and seedboxes. just wanted more info. I'm seeing articles about australia and uk beginning to use isp's to censor websites and just wondering what the future will be for torrent users. there is also a 3 strikes law in france where if you are caught by the isp downloading you can be cut off from internet. just wondering if there was any way to avoid isp monitoring.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Dedicated Mind

I use bittorrent and saw a reference to vpn and seedboxes. just wanted more info. I'm seeing articles about australia and uk beginning to use isp's to censor websites and just wondering what the future will be for torrent users. there is also a 3 strikes law in france where if you are caught by the isp downloading you can be cut off from internet. just wondering if there was any way to avoid isp monitoring.

I would recommend using Peer Block (http://www.peerblock.com/). This prevents unwanted parties from making connections to your torrent shares to see what you've downloaded and what you're sharing for upload. It blocks all packet transmissions to the listed sites and their IPs. This program is the latest release of the old venerable PeerGuardian program.

The lists of blocked sites are updated regularly and include all of the major players in the "harass file sharing" world. It stops things at the root. You see, the ISPs only "go after" a user when they receive a complaint from the RIAA or one of the companies that the studios hire to monitor compliance with the DCMA. If you use PeerBlock, there won't be any complaints going to your ISP to begin with.

I had the wife of a super-ultracon pastor email me recently asking how she should handle a letter that she had received from her ISP. In the letter, she was being threatened with legal action for "downloading Despicable Me" and a couple other cartoon movies using Bit Torrent. Now, I know these people well. I've worked on their computers and helped them out in other ways... there is simply no way they were downloading copyrighted cartoons with or without Bit Torrent.

She had been very generous over the years in giving out her router's password to whoever showed up at her home. If anyone had a Bit Torrent client running in the background and set to "Open When Windows Opens" it would have immediately started downloading whatever they had in their queue when they opened their laptop to check their email at the pastor's house.

A lot of folks are getting bullied by lawyers representing copyright holders even when they had nothing to do with the download. It's completely arbitrary at times. You don't have to be using Bit Torrent to be concerned.

[Pendragon]

Dedicated, if you are looking for absolute Internet anonymity from websites you visit, then Pel is correct, you need a proxy (such as Tor). If you are just looking for protection from content filtering or spying by your ISP, then a VPN is what you are looking for.

This is the VPN I was using: http://hidemyass.com/vpn/

I typically got close to 10Mbps from the HMA VPN, so it's a pretty good one. And with a VPN like HMA, yes you will be anonymous to your ISP. Your ISP can't see anything you are doing when you are connected to the VPN. The only thing they will be able to see is that encrypted IPsec traffic is coming out of the WAN interface on your cable modem and destined for an IP address off their network. They have no way of seeing what websites you go to or any of the content within that encrypted traffic stream.

To break it down simply, you initiate a VPN connection from your computer to an IP address on an HMA VPN concentrator. Once that connection is established, it creates a tunnel through the Internet to this VPN concentrator. This VPN concentrator acts as a router for you and NATs all traffic back to you across the VPN connection. So this means anyone you communicate with will only see the IP address of the HMA VPN concentrator. This effectively makes you anonymous.

If you want ultra security (and based on what you said, you won't need this), you can also configure your PC to connect to a proxy, preferably Tor, in addition to the VPN. So you would have a VPN connection protecting you from snooping by your ISP, then you would bounce your communications through the Tor proxy network. I don't think all the Chinese spies in the world could track you with a setup like that. Of course, there are also a lot of other things you'd need to do at the application level to make sure you aren't leaking information out from your browser or cookies or whatnot.

But, if you just want to be able to bittorrent or prevent your ISP from snooping, then HMA VPN is the way to go.

[NorCal]

A VPN Is just a secure encrypted connection routing all information through a secondary location. The packets are encrypted with 512-2048 encryption depending on the software or hardware used.

From the sounds of it you are wanting a service that will mask or proxy your internet activity. HMA is a great site for that (even though the name is foul).

Unless you are business needing remote offsite setup at a cheap coast, a roaming traveler needing access to his home office, or a cyber criminal, you really do not need a VPN/Proxy application.

Like Pendragon, I once was involved in internet Piracy. I too was convicted of it. We are talking tera bytes of data back in the late 90's to early 2ks. It is basically theft and I do not involve myself in that anymore.

[RandyWayne]

If you have the application Dropbox, you have a form of a Virtual Private Network. I have a Pogoplug storage device setup which is another. So a VPN can take the form of being able to remote into another computer or simple a shared storage area which you can access from anywhere on the net. I think that VPN's (as well as 'cloud' computing) is simply new terminology to some older and very broad concepts which is helping to confuse a lot of people.

[RandyWayne]

Originally Posted by NorCal

A VPN Is just a secure encrypted connection routing all information through a secondary location. The packets are encrypted with 512-2048 encryption depending on the software or hardware used.

From the sounds of it you are wanting a service that will mask or proxy your internet activity. HMA is a great site for that (even though the name is foul).

Unless you are business needing remote offsite setup at a cheap coast, a roaming traveler needing access to his home office, or a cyber criminal, you really do not need a VPN/Proxy application.

Like Pendragon, I once was involved in internet Piracy. I too was convicted of it. We are talking tera bytes of data back in the late 90's to early 2ks. It is basically theft and I do not involve myself in that anymore.

There isn't a set bit rate for encryption over a VPN. It is important to realize that when talking about very large keys like 1024-4096 or larger, we're talking about the encryption on the actual key using the public/private key method. The actual symmetrical key is still often "only" 128 bit which is still more then enough to lock any data. 256 is widely used as well simply because it sounds better and more secure to the end user -and doesn't take any more processing power, so why not?